‘My Hovercraft Is Full of Eels’ in Many Languages

[pimlottc]

Those of a certain age may remember a similar project by Ethan Mollick on what Wikipedia adorably calls the “early web” in which the phrase was “I can eat glass, it does not hurt me”.

> The Project is based on the idea that people in a foreign country have an irresistable urge to try to say something in the indigenous tongue. In most cases, however, the best a person can do is "Where is the bathroom?" a phrase that marks them as a tourist. But, if one says "I can eat glass, it doesn't hurt me," you will be viewed as an insane native, and treated with dignity and respect.

https://web.archive.org/web/20040201212958/http://hcs.harvar...

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Can_Eat_Glass

[Balgair]

> > But, if one says "I can eat glass, it doesn't hurt me," you will be viewed as an insane native, and treated with dignity and respect.

Thanks, now my coffee is all over my desk. ;)

[tylerhou]

The Latin is somewhat awkward:

> Mea navis volitans anguillis plena est

This is technically correct, but `anguillis` generally should be in the genitive case "anguillarum" for classical Latin - that is, "full 'of' eels", instead of the ablative which is used here, "full 'by means of/with respect to' eels".

> Navis volitans mihi anguillis plena est

The same criticism for `anguillis` applies here. Also, the usage of the dative of possession (mihi) is non-standard because it is usually reserved when you want to emphasize that a person has possession: "nomen mihi est Bob" -- "my name is Bob". The fact that I have a hovercraft isn't really the focus of the sentence - the fact that it is full of eels is far more interesting. It's not technically wrong, but I don't think any Roman would translate this sentence this way.

[bhaak]

Wikipedia has an IMO better translation: "mea navis aëricumbens anguillis abundat" from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Latin_phrases_(M)

My Latin is rusty but "navis aëricumbens" invokes the image of a ship driving through the air like a skiff through water. Much better than just "flying ship" which reminds me more of an airplane than a hovercraft.

When in doubt you can always look what words the modern Romance languages use. Most seem to have a word similar to French "aéroglisseur", air glider.

[al2o3cr]

"people called Romanes they go to the house??"

[pfortuny]

AFAIK plenus requires an ablative: like in “gratia plena” (full of grace), “pleni sunt coeli et terra gloria tua” (heavens and earth are full of your glory) etc...

[Balgair]

The Maori translation is a bit off, as it says that the (poorly translated) hovercraft is made with a peak amount of eel (not plural). It seems a fair number of these translations do not connotate that the hovercraft is filled with eels (plural) but rather that it is an eel (singular) that is taking up a lot of room in the hovercraft.

In general, if you go to google translate, you'll see that this phrase is not well translated. Hovercraft is a tough one in general, and some languages don't have an eel in their vocab. Still, it shows that text translation is not very easy, as environment, persons speaking, and context really matter.

[_-__---]

How would one say this in a better Maori translation?

[egypturnash]

The fact that someone translated this into Sumerian made me laugh out loud. My brain finds strange things funny sometimes.

[basementcat]

How did they figure out how to write 'hovercraft' in Sumerian? Was there a 'Rosetta Stone' like codex describing futuristic transportation technology?

[ekke]

This is HN after all - some version of ES/JS:

  class Eel {
      valueOf () { 
          return 'https://imgflip.com/meme/Bad-Joke-Eel';
      }
  }

  const craftCapacity = 331,
        hovercraft = Array.from(Array(craftCapacity), () => new Eel);

[Klathmon]

It's "My hovercraft is full of eels", not "My hovercraft has an arbitrary amount of eels in it"!

Now looking at the ES5 spec [0], the max length of an array is an unsigned 32-bit integer due to the `ToUint32` operation that the spec defines. So that means our `craftCapacity` here needs to be 2^32-1

Sadly we can't use `Number.MAX_SAFE_INTEGER` here because that assumes double-precision floating points as the underlying storage method, so we just have to hardcode our value:

  const hovercraft = Array(4294967295).map(() => 'https://imgflip.com/meme/Bad-Joke-Eel')

[0] While the spec says this in a roundabout way, i'm not sure if any implementations actually adhere to this limit, and i'd guess most convert the array to a hashtable internally long before it gets to that size.

[kaycebasques]

I wish that this site also translated the translations back into English, similar to what many people are doing in this thread.

[exabrial]

I spit my milk out on the Scottish one

[jwilk]

Do you mean Scots or Scottish Gaelic?

[singingfish]

this is my go to page for testing unicode stuff :)

[nanis]

The Turkish translation (rather than word substitution) would be: "Hoverkraftımı mürenler (or just müren) bastı".

[flyingcircus3]

Sometimes I wonder if hackernews has become a reliable training ground for nascent neural networks. This thread of comments perfectly follows the trend of "the best way to find the right answer is to put a bunch of wrong answers on the internet, and just let those hairsplitters sort this out."

I wonder if there were a method by which we could falseify such a hypothesis, and simply check other social media for it's reverberations of falsehoods we intentionally plant, like how organized crime traces down their bugs, er, rats, er leakers, that's the word. Or how a fast Fourier transform looks at a periodic signal, and deduces the component frequencies.

It's probably just a pipe dream though. And we all know there isn't just this series of tubes lying around for us to practice on.

[taserian]

I've always wanted a page where it would have the translation of "I'm sorry, but I don't speak a word of X" in perfectly enunciated X for all X in [Languages].

I guess this is the next best thing.

[Tephlon]

One of my favourite things to do is say "I'm sorry, I don't speak any French" in perfect French (According to an actual French person).

"Desolée, Je ne parle pas Français"

[zokier]

The Finnish translation, while very much correct, feels bit archaic; I think at least in casual contexts most people would use the form "Minun ilmatyynyalus on täynnä ankeriaita"

The Northern Sámi translation feels wrong, although its grammar never was my strong points I think more correct form would be "Mu áibmofanas lea dievva ággarasaid"; I think the English translation of "Mu áibmofatnasis lea dievva ággarasaid" would roughly be "My hovercraft has full (of) eels"

[posterboy]

> My hovercraft has full (of) eels

that wouldn't even surprise me because e.g. French has similar idioms, "il'y'a" ''there is'', literally ''it there has'' (though 'y' is probably not even a word on it's own, ''there is close eough'').

[coldcode]

Sadly no pronunciation of the Romulan "Arham rrh'eilln selae'enh ihircrycae'eri nnea drihaen'in'hhuien"

[jdmichal]

/a.ɾʰam r̩ʰ.eɪ.l̩n sɛ.le.ɛɲ i.hir.kɾɪ.ke.ɛ.ɾi nːɛ.a dɾi.hen.in.xuɪ.ɛn/

This is put together using the pronunciation guide present on rihan.org, which does not list IPA. So take this as a very rough attempt.

[Angostura]

My nipples explode with delight.

[alistoriv]

Happy to see a Welsh translation, but I'm interested where the word for hovercraft came from. The hofren part comes from hofran (which is just a borrowing of hover), but what about fad?

[masteruvpuppetz]

Fork!! no Urdu?

[fahadkhan]

There's a invitation to contact the author with additions at the bottom of the page. I would if I knew what eel and hovercraft are in Urdu.

[yantrams]

This got me thinking about what an appropriate word for hovercraft in Sanskrit could be. Sarva-Madhyama-Plavaka maybe? Translates to something that jumps/glides over all media.

Edits: Grammar

[monster_group]

Wouldn't प्लवयानम् be sufficient (literally translates to hover-vehicle)? Full sentence would be मम प्लवयानं जलव्यालैः सम्मर्दम्।

[talonx]

A lot of Indian language translations are a bit off. I wonder how many others that I don't know myself are too?

[xelxebar]

The Japanese is also awkward. The recording is also extremely non-native.

[pjmlp]

Mirandese

> L miu hobercraft stá cheno d'anguias

[petecox]

It's interesting that a number of Romance languages, but notably not Spanish or French, prefix the subject pronoun (my) with a definite article.

The-my-hovercraft

[Ritsuko_akagi]

juts wanted to say eel is called as kucia "কুচিয়া" in assamese but the page says eel.